I don't think America works. It limps along, badly in need of repair on a lot of fronts.

But just as a point, I get damned sick and tired of people who don't know me making all sorts of unfounded assumptions about what I don't know and haven't experienced when it may very well be that I know more and have experience one helluva lot more than they have.

There are, indeed, instances of police brutality, and uncalled for intimidation by police, and some folks seem to take a fierce joy in zeroing in such instances. But this sort of thing doesn't hold a patch to some things I've heard from people I know who have lived in real police states.

I'm talking about a Hungarian Jew I know who got out of Europe about two minutes before he and his family were about to be picked up and hauled off to a concentration camp. His offense? He was Jewish. Or an Estonian who, not wanting to trade one police state for another, walked across half of Europe with his family when Germany was losing the war and the Russians were moving in. Or Simon, who lived under apartheid in South Africa. Or Ann Nguyen ("Ann" is her anglicized name) who escaped from Vietnam after the Americans left. Or—a long list of people I know personally and have talked to me about their experiences. Including Rolf Holtzman, who was in the Hitler Youth, not a matter of his choice, like, say, an American kid joining the Boy Scouts. He and the other boys (14, 15, 16 years old) were made into soldiers toward the end of the WWII. At their first opportunity, he and a group of other boys surrendered to the Americans. Great life for a kid!!

I could list a lot more. True, I didn't share these experiences, but on the fairly rare occasion when someone in the U. S. gets pushed around, or worse, by a cop, there are such things as civilian police review boards. At least there are in Seattle, and complaints about such incidents can be taken to them, and I know of several situations where individual police officers were either disciplined or discharged as a result of charges brought (such as a nonparticipating bystander getting gratuitously maced by a policeman during the WTO riots). A fair number of "overenthusiastic" policemen were fined and discharged in the wake of the WTO donnybrook. And Seattle's police chief took the occasion to do a fair amount of "housecleaning" in the Seattle Police Department.

Don't make assumptions about what I know or don't know. Because you don't know!

Don Firth